Majority of AGO staff polled: Letter writers not speaking for them
by Dan Heilman
Source says the vote was 52-30; Some maintain management-initiated ‘informal survey’ process was coercive.
A majority of staffers at the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office who participated in an informally conducted survey today said that the three assistant AGs who penned and circulated a letter critical of Lori Swanson do not speak for them, according to officials at the office.
Swanson called in former Judge and U.S. Attorney Miles Lord and former Judge Jonathan Lebedoff early today to conduct an informal series of interviews with AGO employees and collect their thoughts via confidential forms. While the forms didn’t specifically address the issue of unionization, the results made the feelings of the staff clear, maintained deputy attorney general Karen Olson.
“It was a definite majority,” said Olson. “We wanted to see what people were thinking in an impartial way.”
A source close to the situation said the final tally was 52-30 against the three letter-writers. However, the source said, 14 employees refused to complete the form, calling it coercive, and approximately 30 others were either out of the office or otherwise unable to participate.
The survey was conducted less than a week after three assistant AGs -- Susan E. Damon, Daniel S. Goldberg, and Amy R. Lawler – made public a letter they sent to Swanson. The letter was critical of the AG and of her alleged resistance to accommodate her employees’ desire to organize.
Swanson responded Tuesday in an e-mail to her staff by saying she had been out sick last week and so didn’t have a chance to review the letter before it was made it public. She also characterized the letter as a “political swipe”
Olson said both she and Goldberg spoke with employees prior to distributing the survey, and that Lawler was in on the tallying process.
A majority of AGO employees allegedly signed union cards last year, potentially creating a bargaining unit within the office. However, the high rate of turnover in the office – which some estimate might be as much as a third in the last year -- has apparently cut into the pro-union contingent’s numbers.
AGO spokesman Brian Bergson said Swanson is being as accommodating as she can be with the pro-union faction of the office, and that unionization has been a topic of discussion there for years.
“This was an issue when Skip Humphrey was the attorney general,” Bergson said. “It’s been around a long time.”
